i just saw a new psychiatrist and I know he’s not Right For Me bc the reason I went undiagnosed with autism for so long is that I’m very social and I painstakingly adapted a lot of behaviors throughout my childhood to be more socially “acceptable” going so far as having family members help train me to make eye contact and when I told him I’m recently diagnosed he said “is that a diagnosis you identify with a lot or that you’d be okay with changing” and I’d only been talking to him for like…..25 minutes and he was like “because you seem very social, so I wouldn’t have made that connection”
YOU’VE KNOWN ME!!!! FOR LESS THAN HALF AN HOUR!!!!
it’s just frustrating bc I get this response a lot from people who are meeting me after two decades of intensive behavior checking bc I didn’t know I had autism and thought I was just weird and needed to fix myself.
I forced myself to never stim, I’ve struggled with volume control and an auditory processing disorder every day, my brother actively trained me to make eye contact at age ten, I learned to use humor to cover my total lack of situational and social awareness, and after 20 years of struggling like this, ppl will be like “but you don’t act autistic”
bitch you’re right!!!!! I don’t!!!!!! because I wasn’t allowed to and it’s had emotional consequences I’m only just now beginning to unravel!!!!
all cops are bastards…and whiny pissbabies apparently
this is from my home town. i don’t even know what to say.
fuck all cops
The saddest part is that apparently the newspaper did issue a public apology after this. How disappointing to see them cave to what sounds like a child’s temper tantrum.
Boozhoo (hello), my name is Ken, I am a disabled Ojibwe artist from northern Wisconsin. I am writing this post because I am having a hard time making ends meet and any donations I could possibly receive at this time would be greatly appreciated. Recent events have left my bank account depleted and my cupboards bare, I have some food but it will not last and I still do not know how I will cover all the utility bills.
I do have PayPal, that is really the best way to donate at this time, the email I use for that is: baapimakwa@gmail.com, or you can click here.
Trying to catch up but always coming up short, just paid the water bill off and depleted what was left of my disability payment, and now there’s the gas / electricity to worry about.
(Image caption:
Sensory neurons from the head and face (green) are wired directly into
one of the brain’s primary emotional signaling hubs, called the
parabrachial nucleus (PBL). Pain in the head or face stimulates PBL
neurons (pink). Credit: Courtesy of Fan Wang)
Hate headaches? The distress you feel is not
all in your – well, head. People consistently rate pain of the head,
face, eyeballs, ears and teeth as more disruptive, and more emotionally
draining, than pain elsewhere in the body.
Duke University scientists have discovered
how the brain’s wiring makes us suffer more from head and face pain. The
answer may lie not just in what is reported to us by the five senses,
but in how that sensation makes us feel emotionally.
The team found that sensory neurons that
serve the head and face are wired directly into one of the brain’s
principal emotional signaling hubs. Sensory neurons elsewhere in the
body are also connected to this hub, but only indirectly.
The results may pave the way toward more
effective treatments for pain mediated by the craniofacial nerve, such
as chronic headaches and neuropathic face pain.
“Usually doctors focus on treating the
sensation of pain, but this shows the we really need to treat the
emotional aspects of pain as well,” said Fan Wang, a professor of
neurobiology and cell biology at Duke, and senior author of the study.
The results appear online Nov. 13 in Nature Neuroscience.
Pain signals from the head versus those from
the body are carried to the brain through two different groups of
sensory neurons, and it is possible that neurons from the head are
simply more sensitive to pain than neurons from the body.
But differences in sensitivity would not
explain the greater fear and emotional suffering that patients
experience in response to head-face pain than body pain, Wang said.
Personal accounts of greater fear and
suffering are backed up by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI),
which shows greater activity in the amygdala – a region of the brain
involved in emotional experiences – in response to head pain than in
response to body pain.
“There has been this observation in human
studies that pain in the head and face seems to activate the emotional
system more extensively,” Wang said. “But the underlying mechanisms
remained unclear.”
To examine the neural circuitry underlying
the two types of pain, Wang and her team tracked brain activity in mice
after irritating either a paw or the face. They found that irritating
the face led to higher activity in the brain’s parabrachial nucleus
(PBL), a region that is directly wired into the brain’s instinctive and
emotional centers.
Then they used methods based on a novel
technology recently pioneered by Wang’s group, called CANE, to pinpoint
the sources of neurons that caused this elevated PBL activity.
“It was a eureka moment because the body
neurons only have this indirect pathway to the PBL, whereas the head and
face neurons, in addition to this indirect pathway, also have a direct
input,” Wang said. “This could explain why you have stronger activation
in the amygdala and the brain’s emotional centers from head and face
pain.”
Further experiments showed that activating this pathway prompted face pain, while silencing the pathway reduced it.
“We have the first biological explanation for
why this type of pain can be so much more emotionally taxing than
others,” said Wolfgang Liedtke, a professor of neurology at Duke
University Medical Center and a co-author on Wang’s paper, who is also
treating patients with head- and face-pain. “This will open the door
toward not only a more profound understanding of chronic head and face
pain, but also toward translating this insight into treatments that will
benefit people.”
Chronic head-face pain such cluster headaches
and trigeminal neuralgia can become so severe that patients seek
surgical solutions, including severing the known neural pathways that
carry pain signals from the head and face to the hindbrain. But a
substantial number of patients continue to suffer, even after these
invasive measures.
“Some of the most debilitating forms of pain
occur in the head regions, such as migraine,” said Qiufu Ma, a professor
of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the
study. “The discovery of this direct pain pathway might provide an
explanation why facial pain is more severe and more unpleasant.”
Liedtke said targeting the neural pathway
identified here can be a new approach toward developing innovative
treatments for this devastating head and face pain.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.